HTC delays One release until the end of March

TAIWANESE PHONE MAKER HTC has delayed the release of its flagship One smartphone until the end of March in the UK.

Following its announcement at a glitzy launch event in London before MWC, HTC promised to have the One on shelves in the UK this week - Friday, to be specific. However things haven't gone quite to plan for the phone maker, as it has had to push back the handset's release date.

An HTC spokesperson said, "We will start fulfilling pre-orders by end March in certain markets and will roll out to more markets as we approach April."

HTC gave no reason for the delay, but speculation suggests it's related to the HTC One's Ultrapixel camera. There's also talk that it could be because of the handset's aluminum casing, with each chassis taking 200 machine hours to build.

Still, in our opinion the HTC One is worth the wait. We've been spending some time with the phone, which features a 4.7in HD 1080p display, a quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and Google's Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean mobile operating system. This comes skinned in the latest version of HTC's Sense 5.0 user interface, which brings the firm's Flipboard style Blinkfeed widget to its flagship smartphone.

The device also features a 4MP Ultrapixel camera that HTC claims can capture 300 percent more light than average smartphones, a 2.1MP videocall camera, 4G LTE connectivity and either 32GB or 64GB of internal storage.